T minus 23 hours and counting...

[from a hotel room in Florence, Kentucky]

What a week!  It's always hectic whenever we're about to depart on a trip, wherever that may be, but yesterday takes the cake.  Yesterday I didn't know if we were going to make it out the door without forgetting something major, like shoes or passports, or something like that. So far, the list of forgotten items only includes melatonin, a few magazines, the electrical adapters, and our Bibles (thank goodness for the Kindles)! Ellie has footwear, Reni has his legs, and I remembered the passports and my contact lens case (which is an inside joke with Nathan and I -- I think have have a couple dozen in a drawer at home because I'm always buying one on a trip).

We had a bunch of bags open in the middle of the living room floor and were literally tossing items in with no thought given to sorting, optimal spacing, weight, whatever.  It's not much of an exaggeration to say that we sorta tossed food in the general area of the kids too while we frantically packed, printed off info sheets, took phone calls, and grabbed the next item that came to mind.  At about 4:00 as we pulled into the hotel parking lot my stomach reminded me that I had forgotten to eat lunch.

This weekend we are hosting our last ever (sniff sniff) college ski retreat and while most years I'm stressing about ice on the roads or blizzards closing down interstates, this year we were fretting about the weather being TOO warm and a forecast that called for 80% chance of rain all day.  So, while we should have been packing, we were calling the creation museum and aquarium for group rates and making plans B, C, and D in case we faced an onslaught of students who wanted to bail at the last minute.  And because we are just staying another night near the airport to fly to Albania the next day, we had to pack two sets of travel bags (one for the retreat and one for Albania).

We NEVER travel when school is in session (aka when the student center is open).  It's just a lot to leave someone else in charge of (and we were starting to remember that as the days to our departure dwindled).  We did it once during Ellie's adoption trip for one week, and we're doing it again next week for this scouting trip to Albania.  Due to a big football game taking place Sunday night which trumps our regular Global Cafe, this trip will only involve us missing one regular Sunday evening service, and being that it's only our 2nd miss in 13 years, we gave ourselves a pass.  We have two seniors on our cabinet who have lived with us during the summer months, so we knew that bases could be covered with these girls having house-sat for us before, albeit during a different time of the year.  Nevertheless, there were a ton of details to take care of before we left because it wasn't like we were just locking up the building and no one would see our mess!

The sessions for our retreat are now over, everyone is checked out of the hotel (except us) and the crew is out on the slopes.  After all our concern, we only had a handful opt out of skiing (and they're just going to play games in the lodge while everyone else hits the slopes) and I think everything is going pretty smoothly!  It was a great bunch of students and it's nice when you don't have to stress about how they're going to behave in a hotel, if they're going to complain about an unmet expectation (which we try our hardest to manage), or if they're just going to do something dumb.  And hooray that no one got lost!

To save space in the van, we decided to leave the portacrib at home and see if Ellie and Reni could sleep in the same bed together.  Yeah, I don't know what we were thinking.  After about an hour, we gave up that allusion, but that meant that Nathan and I had to take turns sleeping on the pullout with Reni.  Not so comfy.  Did I mention that we both had back issues plague us this week (Nathan's back will sporadically bother him, every few years or so -- me, never)?  You can add that to the prayer request list for our travels!

Reni woke up this morning with a low-grade fever so we made the decision that I would stay at the hotel with him while Ellie went with Nathan to the slopes with the students.  They left around 12:30 and won't be back until after 10PM.  That leaves me with lots of time to organize our hastily packed duffle bags and carry-ons. As I create this post, Reni's now resting on the bed with his Cars valentines purchased this morning on a run to the grocery store for more retreat food.  I think he'll give them out to the village kids when we go later next week.  Not sure he understands what Valentine's are, but he knows that's what they're called. ;-)

The plan is to fly out after lunch tomorrow and arrive in Albania around 11:15 on Monday morning.  We hope to hit the ground running, provided we can all get some sleep on the overnight flight -- and that's provided we can find some melatonin before we leave!

UPDATE (2 hours later):  the fever has returned and Reni has also vomited.  We could be in for an interesting trip tomorrow!  Thank you to those of you praying for our family!